Femme Too Deep is a podcast about the inner life and ruminations of one femme person, me the host Baby Ange. It is a place for further exploration of my own thoughts and ideas, and also to connect and share the stories and thoughts of other people, both femme and not, that inspire and otherwise captivate me. My hope is that more femme’s will join me in my otherwise lonely pursuit of self-awareness, and we can all realize our power, over-throw white supremacist capitalistic patriarchal ideas of normativity, and change the course of history.

Welcome back for part II of Trading Heroes for Ghosts! How did you like Part I? I really wanna know, if it was stuff you already knew and had thought about, or was it new, and whether new or old, how did it resonate with you? I want to know so much, that I’m going to give you an incentive for your feedback. If you DM me on IG or email me at ange@babyange.com, a couple or a few sentences about Part I, I will pull a tarot card and do a mini reading for you. This is a trade, so no cash exchanged. You just message me the sentences and I will reply with a thanks, a picture of the card I pulled and the message, with my interpretation. That way we both get multiple benefits. And if you have a question you want answered, meditate on that after you send me the feedback. The answer will reveal itself in the pull. I can guarantee that. I cannot guarantee that you will be read to hear it, but it will be revealed.

So, part II. In this episode I am trying to round it all out. We are never going to leave this subject. We will always come back to it, but I am a storyteller, and I do like an arc and so we’re just rounding that out now, before we peel back the next layer of the onion in our next episode. Before we move one.

I want to get clear on the ways that the self-concept is misguiding for our journey here. I want to talk about the brain’s role in the Self-concept and especially in creating and reifying our self-concept, and I want to learn how we shift from identifying with the self-concept, to the Self, where that happens (the heart) and how we do so magically and with the body, instead of all of this being work that we do in the ether but with no real grounding here. We have to ground everything we do. We are all 4 elements, air, fire, water, and earth. Never forget that. New agey spiritual BS will try and get you to only focus on the air and fire, fire because it’s alchemical. Remember, there is water and earth as well!!!

This episode also comes with a worksheet to help you identify the ways that you over-identify with the self-concept and how to shift towards alignment with your Self and collective consciousness. That worksheet is available here. Upon entering your email address and joining the Femme Too Deep Flock, you’ll be sent the Self Alignment Worksheet. Please share your worksheets with me via email, or IG/Twitter, if you feel like it. The examples on the sheet are my own true and real reflections. I modeled the worksheet exactly off an exercise I did myself first.

Finally, I am in my final stretch for submissions. I have just one more due at the beginning of next month. I look forward to having more time and being able to record more regularly. Thank you for your patience and support with these late episodes. I hope to share so much about this time and what I have learned.

Since we touched on authority in our last episode, and because it’s grad season, I want to address the truth of our Self, and self with a capital S, and how important it is to get an understanding of a dichotomy that we are all dealing with as a result of being in the metaphysics of our time, as a result of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy and normativity, as a result of the nature of this hologram that we live in. It’s the nature of living in a projection, and of being a projector. Grads all over are going onto their next chapters, and they are going to learn or discover new things about themselves. They are going to adopt new ways of living and being, and their self-concept will change, but the Self, our truth is the same, and it is that which we have to contend with regularly that is the lifelong pursuit those of us lucky enough to heed the call, will take.

This will be a 2-Part series, with a workshop in the 2nd half.For now, we will:

Look at how there is the Self v self-concept

What the difference between the two

How we connect with Self

The benefits of connecting with Self

I share some of my favorite Graduation Commencement Ceremony speech by David Foster Wallace (Full Version available here)

We are in the 2nd week of Ramadan.I do observe.It is my 4th year doing so.I am not Muslim.The Quran and Sufi teachings & meditation are the highlight and greatest shift in my spiritual journey.So, naturally, when I began to consider spiritual fasting, I looked to Islam.Ramadan is my equivalent of X-mas. It brings me to the heights of joy and gratitude.I am excited to process this year’s fast and share with you what I have learned. That will have to be after the end of it, next month.I’ll be observing until June 16th, and in addition to my fast from food, I also fast from social media and delete all social media apps from my phone (the ones I actually use), so my presence will be even more limited than normal, but I will check in from my laptop every now and then.

I hope your Summer starts off well. I hold you all in my prayers everyday.I wish us all Love.

For those in the Northern Hemisphere, I am curious, what are your plans for Spring? Have you considered that as the earth starts to bloom her beauty and shine her light on us longer and stronger, that her energy is available for us to reciprocate and draw from? If you haven’t and you want to, this episode is for you! I have three, just two as of this publication, writing submissions for Spring, so creation is very prominent in my life. It is also Spring, and though it started in Mercury Retrograde, Mercury goes direct on Saturday, April 14th, so the time to start projects is HERE, officially!

In this lucky 13th episode, I discuss creation and our roll in contributing. Since Spring brings us more daylight, I consider the maxim “Fiat Lux” and how it is not just a gift of light to us from the heavens, but a call that we must create and give light. So, if we aren’t merely spectators to this sport, how do we create? How do we heed the call and follow the path that the universe would have us follow? I also consider how submission gets us all that we need, humility restores our faith and strengthens our intuition, and I even share an urgent money spell that worked for me, because if it’s true, I am always compelled to share. The full spell is available on IG @femmetoodeep

Hooooow does 6 weeks escape one….or rather, how does one escape 6 weeks?! Where does our time go? Better asked, where do we go? Because it really doesn’t mean to slip us by and terrorize us, as a result, though we think it does.

I apologize for the hiatus. It was not a planned one! The plan was to do an episode on time and our utilization, and then I went through a very difficult interaction with time. Yet again, the universe is intent on teaching me the lessons I’m addressing here, and I am grateful, because the insights are so important, but I really wanted to be hitting episode 20 by now!

This week I address time, our relationship to it, and what it is as explored through Martin Heidegger, the good ole Baby Ange fave. I discuss how my time has been, what I learned about it, what we all need to know about it, and how its 3-dimensionality can be understand to shift us from this linear concept to a more living, full, and vibrant relationship with which we are in communion with.

In this episode:

Being limitless with limits (as philosophized by Mr. Weenie’s character in Open Season 2)

How Being is time and time is being (as explained by Martin Heidegger)

The 3D nature of time

How we are never without time, nor can time be in a deficit

How we can be with and have more time

Baby Ange’s time travel

Thank you to everyone who listens and downloads this episode. Thank you to EVERYONE who has rated the show. Please rate, comment, email, and hit me on IG or Twitter @femmetoodeep

Also, please let my nieces know what you think about their closing feature! They often hear about my podcasting and they ask a lot about it. My middle niece, Av’s, always asks to be on it. She is an Aquarius with SO MUCH to tell us, and I would love to produce her own podcast for her, if I had time, so for now I put a feature of them on the show, so that they are with me and us every episode. They are our future. I need them to know that their voices are VITAL. I hope you will cheer them on, and if you do, I will share it with them and it’ll make their day. You can catch them at the end of the podcast in this episode. I might try it somewhere else next time, but please affirm their presence with a message, if you have time!

They are everywhere, at all times, and we are never not grappling with them. I discussed last episode how we live in uncertainty. It is the nature of our world. Uncertainty can be an insecure place to dwell, because we seek to know. We have to see the answer to uncertainty, often times, as possibility. Dwelling in possibility is the best place in fact, but we don’t just ask any question.

We have to learn to ask the right questions. The wrong questions just leave us caught up in our neuroses and further pain and suffering.

Examples of the right types of questions to ask are sourced from different guides, and are as follows:

What is trying to emerge?

What gift do I have to give?

How much power can flow through me?

What gift do I have to give the world?

What is the next step I have to take?

What idea is the universe trying to express through me?

What is seeking to emerge in my life?

What is the universe up to?

What must I become to manifest the vision that I am beginning to see?

Where must I grow?

Where must I unfold?

What habits must change?

What thought patterns must dissolve?

A huge problem is that we are often answering the questions ourselves. If you’ve done the past 2 workshops and clocked the narratives you tell yourself against the actual fact of it all, you know that you are often answering the questions incorrectly!!!

So, we must ask and then wait patiently and openly for the question. We’ll discuss how and why to do this.

Please share some of your questions in the comments on my site www.babyange.com or in the comment section of this episodes post on Instagram. I would sincerely love to see what questions you, 2018 and your part of the universe are pondering!!!

Hi everyone! How was your week? I’m genuinely curious, because I hope January’s treating you well. There are supposedly some pretty hard aspects in the planets this week and I’m not laying low, at all, but everything seems to be moving soooo slowly, based again on some Capricorn placements, so I don’t feel like anything is necessarily going bad, and not even stagnate, just SLOW. Like, getting up this show! It’s been done for days and getting it up and has come so slow!!! Just delays after delays, and it’s like, I can’t even be mad, I just keep moving and hope it eventually makes it out to you. That is very counterintuitive thinking for me, by the way!

Anyway! I wanted to round out the last 2 episodes about gratitude and reconciling the past, because they are so intricately connected, and there has to be some practical application for things like this to really make sense, manifest our hopes and goals, and then move us along toward the change that we’re called to. I also just tend to think that I’ve left something out, so I like these recaps to kind of help tie up any ends I might’ve left loose! Of course, we will always revisit these themes, so there will be other opportunities, but before I move on, I think this is really helpful, and I like to workshop, so I have another worksheet for you!

I also talk about:

2 films I saw since getting my Moviepass card in the mail, Star Wars: The Last Jedi & Coco

How gratitude is an active state pushing us towards the future

How integral joy is to our future progress & becoming

There is a worksheet to get you started on your gratitudinal shift available here and in my bio on IG. I hope that you will take just a few minute with it, to start. I am confident that it will encourage you to engage more fully with it, and I genuinely think it will usher in the new thought process necessary for your shift to a more full and whole-y engagement with Being, which is where we gather our enlightenment for questions like, what we are supposed to do, what our life purpose is, and how we can really get ourselves in right alignment with the rest of humanity for our ultimate revolution and change the course and trajectory we are currently on.

I hope that this episode is helpful and if so that you’ll share it with others!

How do you practice gratitude? Is it kind of like, a list you draw up every now and then that runs through all of the things you have to be thankful for?

Today’s episode is about gratitude. And I had to be careful to not release this episode anywhere near the genocidal celebration known in the US as Thanksgiving. Those reasons should be obvious. And I am very much an advocate and will make the case for thankful living, but I am 100% opposed to the celebration of that holiday and as a personal choice I do not attempt to re-appropriate it and give it any sort of spotlight in my life. But also because the way that we think about gratitude surrounding that holiday is also just not quite where I’m going to be for in this episode.

We think of being thankful as tallying up our good fortune and trying to see the good in it, and that’s real and important on its own, and I address that, but I wanna explore beyond that. I wanna approach and consider thought as a way of thinking, of Being and of cultivating our joy and brain activity that will ultimately be a part of what saves us, should we accept the challenge to change the course of this out-of-control ship we’re all on, heading straight for an iceberg.

In today’s episode I consider what about our society has made a fundamental turn away from gratitude and abundant mainframes by examining the following:

Colonialism/imperialism, white supremacist capitalist patriarchy

Nietzsche’s Nihilism & will to power and Freud’s death drive

Lack as a necessity to and an energetic result of the aforementioned phenomena

The result of all of these; the dampening of our spirits, depression, destitution, and paralyzation we feel from insecurity brought about my lack

Then, I consider how we can face this dilemma to find a solution and our strength through gratitude and even joy, in order to carry out the revolutions that have to happen if we’re going to survive. New agers and the manifestation-obsessed like to think it’s a mere “abundant mindset,” and it is, fundamentally, but it’s also so much more.

We look at the following about gratitude as thought:

Our focus and spirit has to be aligned daily and regularly with its reality. It is not meant to be considered once a year, or in the morning in a journal.

Gratitude is a way of thought, not something that the mind visits along its ways and through the various thought stops that it takes throughout the day.

Heidegger called thinking, thanking and thanking thinking. It’s cultivation, along with joy, beauty and grace will save him from the nihilistic wasteland laid out by Nietzsche

The meaning and etymology of “thanc” as human’s innermost mind and the heart’s core.

Gratitude’s inherent role in creating joy and the role of joy as explained in the “Blueprint for the Black Joy Era,” by @femmetoodeep’s friends Amber J. Phillips, The High Priestess of Black Joy, and Jazmine Walker, the King of the South of the @TheBlackJoyMixtape podcast for the future.

Through Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic,” and the need to recognize and facing the power of the erotic (which is not the pornographic version we refer to in modernity, rather all that we love, brings us joy and that we are thankful for ) in order to create and activate radical change.

I hope that this offers a new perspective on abundance/gratitude mindsets, because if you’re like me, the current ones, though relevant to the rules of cause & effect in this realm, were lacking a little dry. I needed some spice. Heidegger, Nietzsche and Lorde all came through, and I thank them for their work and ask for their continued illuminations and guidance as some of my guides 😃

Here is the first episode of the year, and a note on closing things out to cultivate the new. Saturn’s in Capricorn, so amazing developments are promised in the next 2+ years. Year of the Dog is coming up. But first…2017?! Did you give it a proper, “Boy, bye” Or are you trying to ignore it and just pretend it never happen? If you had an amazing 2017, please share! If not, or if it was a bit of both, then whatever is being held up is growing stale fast, with just 7 days into 2018, so let’s talk and air this bitch out a little. Put the little bitch to bed and get to work. Whichever metaphor works for you, but there is no running from truth, and the sooner we face truths, close out our books, then we are merely kidding ourselves, and we didn’t come here to play. Big Freedia said it already, or did we not hear her clearly? “I did not come to play with you hoes. I came to slay, bitch.”

This had to go up today. Sunday is really perfect for this sort of work. People call it a time of rest, but really I think it’s a time of calm and reflection. I hope you’ve rested, and hopefully now have some time for an action item that I have for you, and I invite you to do it, because I did and it was SO very helpful. (You know that my last month has been SOMETHING ELSE!)

In this episode, I break down the truth-revealing messages from this Mercury Retrograde in Sagittarius cycle. I saw it very clearly in the past month, and then I heard Robert Ohotto’s beautiful audio on this Mercury Retrograde, and he put it all into a clear and succinct message and breakdown of why and how we can utilize this information to catapult us into the next chapter of our lives, without being held back and disconnected from our optimal self.

This Mercury Rx has been so transformative for me, less painful than transformative, in fact. And it’s all in the stars as to why and how that information can be used and alchemized. I share that here in a quick summary, but if you want to go further Robert’s audio is available here.

I wanted to be able to show you how it applied and what I got out of it, and round out our conversations on sadness and fear. Also, it’s the end of the year, so this is good for helping you to take inventory. I share how and why we do that. As well as a chat me and my 5 year old niece had about the nature of truth and perception, which is a theme in this Mercury Rx, as I’ll recap from Robert. That’s at the end though.

A guide at the link in my bio on Instagram is there to help, so feel free to click on that. If you have any questions/comments, let me know! Otherwise, work this and get the clarity and vision you need for the next chapter, the next year, and for life in general.

If you are are living, loving, and paying the minutest bit of attention to people, your community, society, the news, and the world, then you deal with sadness on a pretty regular basis. (If you don’t, then please email me with your secret!)

This week is a continuation of last week’s discussion on fear, because they’re so closely linked, so it’s natural that we now discuss sadness.

My life seems to be playing it out in real time the exact themes and on the exact schedule as the podcast, so it was a very sad and depressing weekend for me. I share that experience, and where I am with it so far.

I explore the uses we have for sadness, what it does, what brings it on and how we can alchemize it. I sit down to talk with one of my very best friends, Andrea, a brilliant thinker/feeler/and lover.

If you are having a rough week, month, season, year, or lifetime, I hope this makes it very clear to you that you are not alone, that you hold power, despite your sadness, and that sadness is part and parcel of life, not something we have to divert in order to live our fullest life.

To Andrea, Love, thank you so much for being here for me through this heartbreaking couple of weeks, thank you for taping this episode with me, and thank you for sparking up that conversation in line that night so many years ago. Your friendship is one of the greatest gifts this life cycle has shared with me. I feel blessed and affirmed by it every time I see/text/talk/hug/think of/and cry with you. I love you.